The Design Museum has partnered with Swarovski for an experiment examining the perception of memories in the digital age. Digital Crystal: Swarovski At Design Museum includes fifteen incredible installations from contemporary designers recovering the lost connection between objects and time. Deyan Sudjic, Director of the Design Museum, explains main idea behind the exhibition:

Digital Crystal: Swarovski at the Design Museum explores the meaning of memory in the digital age, with the demise of the analogue era our relationship and connection with personal memory, photographs, diaries, letters, time and ephemera is changing. The exhibition takes this as its starting point, to question the future and our relationship with the changing world, where it seems all too easy to lose connection with the tangible and the real, as we move ever faster to a digital age where memory and the personal possessions we once held so highly are now online or gone in an instant.

Each designer responded to the brief in extremely different ways. Ron Arad created Lolita, (pictured above), a chandelier with over 2000 Swarovski crystals and 1000 white LEDs which converts the object into a giant interactive pixel board. The chandelier was originally created for Swarovski Crystal Place in 2004 but Arad has repurposed his creation to display tweets (#DigitalCrystal) and SMS messages.

Other artists used the crystals and digital technology in more subtle ways, like Yves Behar, who went for a more minimal approaching, creating a chandelier using only one crystal, one low-energy LED light and one faceted paper shade. Another note worthy installation is ‘Blur’ by Philippe Malouin, who spins multi-faceted Swarovski beads in circles at high speed. With the help of LEDs, the colored beads form abstract ‘light paints’ of concentric colored rings. According to the designer, the dynamic installation blurs boundaries between the physical nature of the crystals themselves and the intangible patterns left behind as they race before our eyes.

The exhibition is on display at the Design in Museum in London until January.